Judge Rules Against Grooveshark in Copyright Infringement Case

In the music industry’s second big legal victory in a week, a federal judge in New York ruled on Monday that Grooveshark, an online music service long vilified by the major record companies, infringed on thousands of their copyrights.

Like Napster, LimeWire, Grokster and other online outlets before it, Grooveshark came under fierce attack from the recording industry for hosting music files without permission. Grooveshark — based in Gainesville, Fla., and identified in court papers by its parent company, Escape Media Group — makes millions of songs available for streaming.

Yet despite numerous legal challenges, the service continued operating and building a huge audience in the years before the arrival of Spotify and other streaming outlets, which operate with the permission of record companies and music publishers. By 2011, Grooveshark — which has licenses for some of its music, but not all — claimed to have 35 million users and was attracting advertising from major brands like Mercedes-Benz and Groupon.

Grooveshark’s defense has long been that it is legal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the federal law that protects websites that host third-party material if they comply with takedown notices from copyright holders.

But on Monday, granting summary judgment in a case filed in 2011 by the three major record companies, Judge Thomas P. Griesa of United States District Court in Manhattan ruled that Grooveshark was liable for copyright infringement because its own employees and officers — including Samuel Tarantino, the chief executive, and Joshua Greenberg, the chief technology officer — uploaded a total of 5,977 of the labels’ songs without permission. Those uploads are not subject to the “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

“Each time Escape streamed one of plaintiffs’ songs recordings, it directly infringed upon plaintiffs’ exclusive performance rights,” the judge wrote in his opinion.

The judge also found that the company destroyed important evidence in the case, including lists of files that Mr. Greenberg and others uploaded to the service.

The next step of the case will be to set damages, and the possibility of a multimillion-dollar ruling against Grooveshark puts the service’s future in doubt. When asked for a comment about the summary judgment decision, John J. Rosenberg, a lawyer for Grooveshark, said, “The company respectfully disagrees with the court’s decision and is currently assessing its next steps, including the possibility of an appeal.”

Grooveshark is also still facing two other copyright suits filed by the music industry, one in New York federal court and one in state court, also in New York.

Last week, in a closely watched case having to do with pre-1972 recordings, a federal judge in California ruled that the satellite broadcaster Sirius XM was liable of copyright infringement for playing songs by the 1960s band the Turtles (“Happy Together”) without permission, under California state law.

The damages in that case have not been set, but it has been seen as pivotal in a wide-ranging effort by record companies and artists to collect royalties on older recordings.

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